


The Thing About a Shark

by vyatka



Category: Orphan Black (TV)
Genre: Alternate Universe, Assassins & Hitmen, Assets & Handlers, Clones, Conspiracy, Mercenaries, Mercenary Sarah Manning, Muzzles, Project Castor, Secret Identity
Language: English
Status: In-Progress
Published: 2019-03-22
Updated: 2019-03-25
Packaged: 2019-11-14 14:32:31
Rating: Mature
Warnings: Graphic Depictions Of Violence
Chapters: 2
Words: 2,017
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/18054305
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/vyatka/pseuds/vyatka
Summary: She's muzzle-masked from the height of her nose to below her chin, most of her features hidden, and it serves to strip her face of humanity or expression. Her eyes flick to Sarah from beneath a fall of her terrible fried hair. Abruptly the monologue from that old shark movie pops into Sarah's head. Something about doll's eyes and screaming.





	1. The Undisputed Truth

Here is the undisputed truth: 

Sarah Manning has a daughter. Her name is Kira, and she has bouncy brown curls just like her father, and she is wild, like her mother. She knows not to swear in front of her grandmother, but that her mother will laugh when it's just them. She is a little girl. She can pick a lock and con a man better than most adults. 

Sarah Manning has a foster brother. He is the only brother she will ever have, or so she thinks for most of her life. His name is Felix. They don't share a last name. 

Sarah Manning has an adopted mother. She's S to her children, Siobhan to everyone else, and a woman who can shoot a card in half (edgewise) looking in a mirror over her shoulder. 

Here is part of the truth: 

Sarah Manning drops out of high school at sixteen, largely because she hates it, and partially because she is nervous about what comes after. Not that it would have stopped her. Nerves and Sarah Manning have never much listened to one another. It is uncertain what would have happened, if she had finished high school. There is certainly a chance that she could have ended up a bleach-blonde manicurist in Toronto - not that there is anything wrong with bleach-blonde manicurists in Toronto. They make adept spies. 

What happens instead, when Sarah Manning is sixteen, facing the world with a gallows humor she got from her Irish upbringing, is that Siobhan teaches her how to shoot. 

They start with cans. The men come later. 

Her first hire is at twenty-one, and she does it alongside Siobhan. It lasts for two years. She kills fifty people. For the next four months, she wakes up screaming, and has to sob into S's shoulder until she calms down. She still remembers them all. 

When she is twenty-three, she has her daughter. The father is named Cal, and he has never done any killing the way she has, but they laugh and smoke and joke together. When he's killed, she cries about it. But not for long. 

Sarah Manning is twenty-eight when she gets shot in the arm and the wound festers. Siobhan spends days fending off the doctor who wants it amputated. She wins, in the end, and now there are only three shiny divots in the skin of Sarah's bicep that show the wound was ever there. They aren't even her most impressive scars. 

Sarah Manning shoots her friend in the field when she's twenty-nine. The story she feeds her CO is blatantly false. Sarah doesn't tell anyone the truth. 

When Sarah Manning is thirty, a Paul Dierdan comes to find her. He comes talking about a Project CASTOR, and although Sarah doesn't know what that is, or particularly care, she leaves with him in the end. She and Siobhan cut off contact. It comes with cutting off Kira. 

It is two years later that she meets Helena. 

 ***

She's kept in Mexico, apparently, or so Sarah originally thinks. Coady enlightens her, both of them squinting into the sun. Sarah's scarf is hot as hell and sweaty-damp on her neck. 

"She arrived from Canada two weeks ago," Coady says. "Quarantine was up yesterday. I would have brought you to meet her sooner, but sometimes it's easier not to tangle with the red tape, and who knows what she picked up on the trip? God knows she had some shit when she first came from Ukraine." 

That gets Sarah's attention. "Ukraine?" 

They pass into the shade of a broad and dusty building, and then into it, and it's so dimly lit that Sarah pulls off her sunglasses. There are a pay of same-faced Castor boys off-duty at the fringe of things. Christ, Sarah's never going to get used to that.  _Clones._ There's a bug zapper going off intermittently, a fan whirring, a security camera slowly moving back and forth like a cat's tail. Dierdan is there. 

"She's Ukrainian-made." Coady clears her throat. "She speaks eight languages, but responds best to Ukrainian, English, Russian. Do you speak any Russian?" 

"Yeah, not a bit." 

"You might want to learn some." An order framed as a suggestion:  _you will learn Russian._

They pass through the building and move onto the next, and that's where she is. 

A cell. 

Sarah almost falters when she sees it. It looks like a  _jail,_ and whatever's inside it is currently nowhere to be seen, but it could be anywhere; the door only has a slim barred visor to see through. 

"Helena," says Coady, in the same way that S used to say 'chicken'. 

And then. 

Inside, she.... _it...._ saunters over to the bars, hooks wiry arms through them.  _Saunters_ probably isn't the right word, but it's not relaxed enough to be an amble, and that's the only other word that comes to mind. 

"Bloody Christ," says Sarah. "What  _is_ she?" 

Her...its...hair is blonde, a burned mess after repeated bleaching. Her eyes are brown, the skin around them red, allergies or tears or chemical burns. As for the rest of her face? Well, Sarah can't tell. She's muzzle-masked from the height of her nose to below her chin, most of her features hidden, and it serves to strip her face of humanity or expression. Her eyes flick to Sarah from beneath a fall of her terrible fried hair. Abruptly the monologue from that old shark movie pops into Sarah's head. Something about doll's eyes and screaming. 

"She's LEDA," Coady says. "One of them, anyway. But you can call her Helena. You  _will_ call her Helena, once you begin working together." 

"LEDA. A Leda clone?" 

"One of two who originally slipped the system," Coady says, far-off. Helena tilts her head. 

Sarah doesn't know much about LEDA - the female CASTOR, or an equivalent - but she  _has_ wondered what they look like, and how much they look like each other. "Does the mask come off?" 

"No," says Coady. "She's a biter. We've had lost fingers, before we fitted her with it. It never comes off." 

Sarah looks into her dead doll's eyes, medium brown eyes. Drunk eyes, crying eyes. The schlera aren't bloodshot, though; they're clear smooth white, and somehow that's freakier. 

Sarah realizes her arms are folded over her chest, and she drops them to her sides, realizing too late that it's only serving to make her look fidgety. Helena's watching. The corners of her eyes crinkle. Is she smiling? Is she baring her teeth? 

Sarah locks eyes with her and refuses to look away.

When she was a kid, there was this boy in one of her classes - Morello, his name was - with whom she spent months engaged in a childishly hostile strongarm struggle, one of those territorial dominance spats over who's the bad bitch of primary school. They spent a lot of time staring each other down; ever since then, Sarah has put a lot of stock in eye contact. Use it to control the situation, she taught herself, and so she and Helena look at each other, fixed and unwavering. 

Those eyes. She feels like she could pitch forward and fall into their depths, and not in a good way. 

Then: "Helena," says Coady, and Helena's eyes snap away. A glitter comes into them, a low kindle. Her eyebrows lift. Some of the threat in her expression sloughs away. "Come on out and say hello," and there it is again - that voice that Sarah uses on Kira, that Siobhan used to use on her ( _chicken)._  

 ***

The cell is unlocked. 

The door rusts open. 

 ***

Helena comes out.  


	2. Liver Chestnut

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> Here is an insurmountable amount of garbage. It disgusts me as well. I apologize in advance. 
> 
> Warnings! For some light incestuous overtones in pretty-standard Helena fashion and a character death.

In the van, Helena looks at Sarah Manning. Helena looks at Sarah Manning and a word comes to her lips and she says it, but she says it quietly, behind the muzzle, and it doesn't come out all the way. It's an exhale, not a vocalization, and Sarah Manning has black hair. Brown-black, not jet, and there's a word for that in horses. In horses they call it  _liver chestnut,_ even though it is not the color of livers and not really the color of chestnuts. But horse colors don't make sense anyway, because the color they have for yellow-goldy horses,  _palomino,_ means "white grape", and those yellowy-goldie-blondie horses aren't white or the color of grapes. 

Helena knows this about horse colors because of Kit Bailey, who was LEDA. 

Helena had that brown-black hair once, and then they took it away from her. She went from a liver chestnut to a white grape. It tries to grow in brown-black but it keeps getting bleached yellowy-goldie-blondie. 

Helena looks at Sarah Manning's hair. 

What she wants to say stays trapped inthe muzzle-mask, and what comes up instead, riding a rasp from the base of her throat, is "Your hair is not regulation," and she makes a creaky scissoring motion with her fingers. 

"She's right, you know," says Dirty Paul. 

Sarah Manning makes a noise like "tch" and mutters "piss off". Piss off what? Where? Who can know? 

The van drives over a hole (maybe on purpose, if Helena knows Dirty Paul) and it judders them. Helena maintains equilibrium. Sarah, standing, jolts the hardest and stumbles, lurching, and Helena (an excuse to touch her!) vipers an arm out and catches her wrist. And what a wrist! Helena yanks and keeps Sarah from hitting the ground, pulls her toward, reels her in like the bluelight of the zapping bug-trap. The wrist is small. Sarah has a little frame, like Helena does. The bones are small. The muscle over them is lean and corded. The skin is dusty. When Helena brings herself to uncurl her fingers, she's left prints in the dust. 

"Thanks," says Sarah Manning. 

Helena smiles. Sarah Manning cannot see it, of course, and for a moment Helena is lost on how else to communicate warmth. 

_Your voice, stupid,_ says Pupok, crawling out from underneath Sarah Manning's belt. Sarah Manning doesn't seem to notice. 

"You're welcome," says Helena. She drudges up the  _you're welcome_ and polishes it as nicely as she can. 

Sarah Manning stops looking at her and looks at Dirty Paul instead. Helena abruptly realizes that Sarah has probably fucked him. That's disappointing, somehow. Sarah is too good for Dirty Paul. 

Helena lets herself imagine it briefly, though. 

Sarah would be on top, mostly so Helena can think about her face instead of Dirty Paul's.  _His_ face doesn't interest her at all. (She thinks about Sarah naked, which is a rude thing to do, but Sarah won't ever know.) Does Sarah have as many scars as Helena does? There are bullet scars on her, Helena knows that for sure, so she peppers the imaginary Sarah with them. The real ones on her arms and the made-up ones that Helena sticks onto her belly and legs. Sarah is not as muscle-and-bone as Helena; she probably gets more to eat, so Helena - in her mind - flares out the curvature of her thighs and breasts. 

Sarah looks back and Helena flushes her mind out like a wound. 

This is when they are stopped. 

Someone has stopped them. 

Helena has to look away from Sarah's face (mirror, mirror) and goes foxchaser-still to listen. There's a key phrase Dirty Paul will say if he wants her to come out and kill. (Smite.)

He doesn't. The exchange lasts a minute, and then Paul climbs back in and they're moving again. 

"Everythin' alright?" says Sarah. 

Helena doesn't sit. She grabs for a handle when they take off, and looks back at Sarah, and is still looking at her when she removes her sidearm from her belt and shoots Dirty Paul in the head. 

The shot goes through the side of his face instead of his head, so he doesn't die right away; instead, the van jerks and fishtails and Helena has to shoot him again, this time in the back of the neck. The walls compress the sound. Her ears ring. There's blood and brain and bone all over the dashboard. 

The van comes out of its spin and coasts to a stop. 

"Very nasty," observes Helena. 

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> me reading my own writing: shut up about horses! shut up about horses! 
> 
> Kit Bailey was the name of Tatiana Maslany's barrel-racing character in _Heartland_.
> 
> My writing feels super _"she said the thing and then she did the thing. the thing was nice."_ lately and I apologize for that. 
> 
> RIP Paul. 
> 
> Please comment/kudos if you enjoyed!


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